zit serve accepts one connection at a time and read its request head and body with no deadline, so a single peer that opened a connection and then dribbled or withheld its request pinned the accept loop and starved every other client -- a real availability gap the in-memory fuzzers could not see, since they never touch the socket. The connection now runs under a whole-connection deadline: the request work races a timed sleep, and a peer that misses the deadline is dropped so the loop moves on. The bind is loopback only and the deadline is generous, so a legitimate request -- even at the reply ceiling -- always finishes far inside it; only a stalled peer is shed. Four end-to-end abuses -- a slow-loris head, a half-sent body, a mid-response disconnect, an idle-connection burst -- each prove the server still answers a fresh request and a real clone still converges, and the fix is shown to be load-bearing by wedging with it removed. A per-read idle timeout and a configurable value are left for later. check-in: 56c17d0675 user: dmestas tags: trunk